ness of toil. To pause in his
toil, to devote himself to his own interests, to gather a knowledge of
the world's commerce, to unite, combine and cooperate in the great army
of peace and industry, to nourish and cherish, build and develop the
temple he lives in is the highest and noblest duty of man to himself, to
his fellow men and to his Creator.

The phenomenal growth and collapse of the Knights of Labor is one of the
outstanding events in American economic history. The membership in 1869
consisted of eleven tailors. This small beginning grew into the famous
Assembly No. 1. Soon the ship carpenters wanted to join, and Assembly
No. 2 was organized. The shawl-weavers formed another assembly, the
carpet-weavers another, and so on, until over twenty assemblies,
covering almost every trade, had been organized in Philadelphia alone.
By 1875 there were eighty assemblies in the city and its vicinity. As
the number of lodges multiplied, it became necessary to establish a
common agency or authority, and a Committee on the Good of the Order
was constituted to represent all the local units, but this committee was
soon superseded by a delegate body known as the District Assembly. As
the movement spread from city to city and from State to State, a General
Assembly was created in 1878 to hold annual conventions and to be the
supreme authority of the order. In 1883 the membership of the order was
591,000; within three years, it had mounted to over 700,000; and at the
climax of its career the society boasted over 1,000,000 workmen in the
United States and Canada who had vowed fealty to its knighthood. It
is not to be imagined that every member of this vast horde so suddenly
brought together understood the obligations of the workman's chivalry.
The selfish and the lawless rushed in with the prudent and sincere.
But a resolution of the executive board to stop the initiation of new
members came too late. The undesirable and radical element in many
communities gained control of local assemblies, and the conservatism
and intelligence of the national leaders became merely a shield for
the rowdy and the ignorant who brought the entire order into popular
disfavor.

The crisis came in 1886. In the early months of this turbulent year
there were nearly five hundred labor disputes, most of them involving an
advance in wages. An epidemic of strikes then spread over the country,
many of them actually conducted by the Knights of Labor and all of th